


What we leave behind

by Thebiwife



Series: Love & Loss [6]
Category: ER (TV 1994)
Genre: F/M, Leaving Home, London, Medical School, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thebiwife/pseuds/Thebiwife
Relationships: Elizabeth Corday/Original Character(s)
Series: Love & Loss [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2033827
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	What we leave behind

“Chicago? Really? That will be intense to say the least,” Dr. Corday’s supervisor said when she had told him the news of her accepting a Trauma fellowship at County General Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, which was due to start in the autumn, (or _fall_ , she told herself.)

“Yes, I’m sure it will. But I’m up for the challenge,” she nodded, insistent not to let anyone sway her plans. She’d been offered the position and accepted almost immediately, only telling her parents once she had already booked her flights out for mid-September.

“Well, Elizabeth, of course I’ll support anything to further your surgical career,” Dr. Charles Corday had told her. “Although I was half expecting to hear of your engagement when you invited us both for dinner.”

Since Drs Corday - one medical and the other academic - had been separated for some time, it was a rare occurrence to get the two of them together, heck, this was the first time she’d seen them in the same room as each other since her graduation. But clearly, while Elizabeth had been serving up the Cottage Pie she’d made for their supper, something had been communicated between them.

Elizabeth glared at her mother. “What did you tell him?”

“You didn’t want him to know?”

“No mother, I did _not_ want him to know,” she exhaled heavily through gritted teeth.

“There’s no shame in having a gentleman friend to spend the night,” her father shrugged. “The two of you have been close since you were kids, it’s about time something happened there.”

“Nothing _is_ happening there,” Elizabeth sighed, taking a rather large swig of her merlot. “Especially not now I’m leaving for America in two months.”

Of course, of all people, it _had to_ have been Philip Yates that Elizabeth’s mother found her in bed with - a couple of months back Isobel had uncharacteristically decided to use her spare key to pop by Elizabeth’s flat in Blackfriars before she headed to a conference on a brisk spring weekday morning. 

When this had happened at age seventeen, - finding the two of them in bed together, that is - her parents had been far from thrilled. Though pragmatic as ever, the Cordays reunited to make sure their daughter not only had _the talk_ , but the accompanying _demonstration_ , (why her fifty-odd year-old mother _owned_ such a thing to demonstrate, young Lizzie didn’t want to know.) Now over thirty, Charles and Isobel’s insistence for their daughter to settle down with Dr. Yates was nothing short of infuriating. Almost as infuriating as the fact that nearly fifteen years later, Elizabeth was still sleeping with the same person, (albeit among others - a particularly clingy Jeremy from Dermatology being the most recent one she broke off.) 

Phil’s father had worked with Charles Corday since the sixties, so naturally Phil and Lizzie would’ve had intersecting lives whether she had chosen to or not; he was her first kiss (at her thirteenth birthday party); he took her to his secondary school leavers’ disco (prom was still safely in the confines of American movie culture in those days); and they had both gone through Medical School - within a year or so of each other - which meant that throughout the 1990s they were still bumping into each other at postgraduate recruitment events, friends’ in common birthday parties, and even once in the waiting room for an interview for the SHO post at the Royal Brompton. (When Elizabeth was offered the job she declined, she was never _really_ going to ever consider it, seeing as her Father’s private hospital had always kept a spot open for her, and since she was one of the few on her course to graduate debt-free, she supposed she did owe him so… but she did at least recommend Phil to the committee when she turned it down.)

They checked in with each other occasionally, sometimes sharing a kiss after dinner for old time’s sake or, more infrequently, sharing her bed after a few drinks (it was so convenient her living so centrally, after all.) But when the Chicago opportunity came up, he hadn’t been any part of her decision making, he wasn’t anyone worth staying behind for. If anything, it was the city that had become her home that she would miss so much. 

* * *

Following her upbringing in rural Sussex, Lizzie had quickly grown fed up of small towns, escaping to Brighton as soon as her parents allowed her in her teens. The pull of a cosmopolitan city like London had been inevitable, particularly when applying for the only medical schools her father deemed _worthy_ ; (London, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge.) It was an obvious choice, and one that she never came to regret. 

After work she could take a walk down towards Tower Bridge, dodging tourists left, right and centre to cross the river and walk in the shadows of the Tower itself, treating herself to a solo dinner-date overlooking the illuminated landmark. Sometimes she would head in the opposite direction, grabbing a drink on the terrace by the Golden Hinde, a falafel from Borough Market stopping by the middle-eastern confectioner to stock-up on Turkish delight for her father, or heading to the dungeon-esque bierkeller for bratwurst and a stein of helles with colleagues. Sometimes she’d keep walking right up to the South Bank, snooping around the Television Studios and National Theatre, once even catching a glance of Ian McKellan and Jennifer Ehle, trying not to embarrass herself too much by reciting lines from Shakespeare or Jane Austen at them.

“So you just have a gentleman friend over to spend the night on a Tuesday for no reason?” her father raised his eyebrows.

“Not everyone enjoys commuting over an hour into the city every day, Daddy,” Elizabeth smirked. "I was doing him a favour."

Her insistence to get her own flat in Zone 1 rather than commuting into London Bridge everyday hadn’t been popular with her parents. Once she had finished the med school rotations while bunking in halls of residence and dingy shared student houses in the East End, the one thing Elizabeth had craved was her own space. While she appreciated the invaluable training she had received and experience she had gained with the NHS, if she was going to sell out to the private sector it at least had to have its perks, so at twenty-four she had signed for a £1000+/month fifth floor flat overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral, wherein she could merely stand by her dining table and take in the views over the Thames, which would forever be her favourite spot, both in the morning with a cup of earl grey and in the evening with a gin and tonic. 

However, after three years working out of London Bridge, giving her limited experience doing the emergent surgeries to which she loved to devote her expertise - despite having earned a reputation early-on for being a dab hand at urgent surgery - the private sector wouldn’t ever handle the kinds of traumas where Elizabeth really adored getting her hands dirty (so to speak), and knowing that it was on her merit alone that she had been selected. Not to mention, working in Daddy’s hospital rather lacked the satisfaction of _making a difference,_ which after all, was the reason she’d gone into surgical medicine, wasn’t it?

Boxed up and awaiting the movers to take all but her two suitcases of prized possessions southward to Daddy’s house, Elizabeth had her final nightcap looking out of that window. Her love for her city, where she had learnt to grow into herself, to heal others and stitch them up, was faultless; the excitement for her next step surpassing any feelings of melancholy over the people she would leave behind. But for now, this place, the City of London, was irreplaceable.


End file.
